In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a
report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the
American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi,
which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens,
and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not
providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence
community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA
outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived
animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary
Clinton of a cover-up.

That’s the part you’ve heard about: failure to protect the personnel at the embassy.
But then Hersh breaks the deeper story wide open:

A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.

A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover
of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always
know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and
shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who
would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his
biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took
place.)

The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set
up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional
leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement
of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a
liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for
years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the
CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be
owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described
in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior
leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was
limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking
members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the
House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the
House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a
genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather
together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they
receive.

The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi
before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was
attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for
the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the
annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’

Benghazi has been described as a U.S. consulate, but it
was not. It was an information office that had no diplomatic status.
There was a small staff of actual State Department information officers
plus local translators. The much larger CIA base was located in a
separate building a mile away. It was protected by a not completely
reliable local militia. Base management would have no say in the
movement of the ambassador and would not be party to his plans, nor
would it clear its own operations with the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. In
Benghazi, the CIA’s operating directive would have been focused on two
objectives: monitoring the local al-Qaeda affiliate group, Ansar
al-Sharia, and tracking down weapons liberated from Colonel Gaddafi’s
arsenal. Staff consisted of CIA paramilitaries who were working in
cooperation with the local militia. The ambassador would not be privy to
operational details and would only know in general what the agency was
up to. When the ambassador’s party was attacked, the paramilitaries at
the CIA base came to the rescue before being driven back into their own
compound, where two officers were subsequently killed in a mortar
attack.

More supposition was that he was now funneling guns to
the rebel forces in Syria, using essentially the Turks to facilitate
that. Was that occurring, (a), and if so, was it a legal covert action?

Boykin said Stevens was “given a directive to support the Syrian
rebels” and the State Department’s Special Mission Compound in Benghazi
“would be the hub of that activity.”
Business Insider reports that Stevens may have been linked with Syrian terrorists:

There’s growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly
murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons
moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.
In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked
Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some
fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.
In November 2011 The Telegraph
reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council,
“met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border
with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money
and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.
Last month The Times of London reported
that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for
Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons
and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
***Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.

The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi and the head
of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and
Support,” which was presumably established by the new government.

That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one
person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy
weapons to Syria.
Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?

Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them “Libyans” when he explained that the FSA doesn’t “want these extremist people here.”
And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a
deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan
revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about
it.

Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as “a base for, among other things, collecting
information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan
government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles” … and that its security features “were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died.”
And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In other words, ambassador Stevens may have been a key player in
deploying Libyan terrorists and arms to fight the Syrian government.Other sources also discuss that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as mainly being used as a CIA operation to ship fighters and arms to Syria.
Many have speculated that – if normal security measures weren’t taken
to protect the Benghazi consulate or to rescue ambassador Stevens – it
was because the CIA was trying to keep an extremely low profile to
protect its cover of being a normal State Department operation.
That is what I think really happened at Benghazi.

Was CIA Chief David Petraeus’ Firing Due to Benghazi?

CIA boss David Petraeus suddenly resigned, admitting to an affair. But Petraeus was scheduled to testify under oath the next week before power House and Senate committees regarding the Benghazi consulate. Many speculate
that it wasn’t an affair – but the desire to avoid testifying on
Benghazi – which was the real reason for Petraeus’ sudden resignation.
And see this.